What is the Best Way to Start Building Backlinks for a New Web Site?

Link building will always be one of the most important factors when building a long term web site, especially if you want to get a majority of your traffic from the search engines. I recently had the chance to interview Alex Pyatetsky from TheHoth, about some of the frequency asked questions in the SEO world, and how important the different methods of link building are for web sites.

What is the best way to start building backlinks for a new web site?

In general, I advise people to follow my Link Building Pyramid strategy. Its proven and it works.

Start off by asking all of your relevant contacts, industry and otherwise, for links on their respective sites/blogs. This seems obvious, but amazingly few people do it. These are people who will help you because they have a vested interest in your success. This includes employees because they want to keep their jobs, investors because your success is their success, vendors because they want to sell you more stuff, industry groups because they want you to keep paying dues and family/friends because they want you to remain happy and not kill yourself. Likewise, keep in mind industry contacts who want to help you out because they believe in “business karma” or may want to ask you for a link/favor at a later time. As you network with more people in the industry, you’ll find more opportunities to get these type of irreplaceable, authoritative links.

Doing this will build up foundational authority for your site. Think of it as showing the search engines “I’m new, but people like/support me.” This type of foundational authority allows you to be much more aggressive going forward with your link building and not have to worry if each additional link you build will sandbox you.

Another tip I’ve been hearing a lot recently is to start off building links with branded anchor texts instead of commercial ones. I haven’t tested this, but, intuitively, it makes sense.

For example, if you just started Petsmart.com, in your early link building you’d focus more heavily on anchor texts like “Petsmart” and “Petsmart.com” and ones like “pet supplies,” “pet food,” “pet toys,” etc., less so. The idea is that as time goes on and Google recognizes you as a legitimate, respected brand, your site will be able to handle many more commercial anchor texts. Personally, I’ve never gone out of my way to do this and still ranked my sites, but that may be because many of the links built for a real company will be branded anyway.  Regardless if this is true or not, diversify your anchor texts in the beginning a don’t get married to a single pet keyword.

That’s how I’d start.

That said, I think most people are too conservative when starting a site. If you build foundational authority, you should be able to start building links normally without many additional constraints. I’ve discussed this with SEOs that have ranked top 3 for terms you’d trade limbs to rank for and it seems to be a consensus.